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My learning curve with NT
I hope that NT will take this (warts and all) in the constructive manner in which it is intended.
I started using NT6.5 approx 2 years ago.
I had coded in Easy Language to a reasonable level but have no other program training at all. I have traded for about 5 years full time.
I learnt Easy Language from Tradestation's resources and the enormously helpful forums.
My transition to NT was difficult but overall worth it.
Anybody trying to get into NT here is my take of the pros and cons
Pros
1.C# (.NET) is a very useful language in that you can program just about anything (see cons 1 tho)
2. Charting is fabulous - it has it's niggles but overall very good.
3.Speed was the thing I noticed moving from tradestation - I was always slowing down, data lagging, etc with TS but I don't get that with NT.
4. The chart can be interactive ie you can use the mouse to click and shoot ( you have to program this).
5. ChartTrader - almost excellent but still a little clunky (IMHO). I do not use DOM.
Cons
1. C#(.NET) - took me about a year or more to get reasonably fluent with it. As a non programmer you have to accept this is a steep learning curve. And I mean steep.
2. Support - poor. Everything useful is not supported - trust me I have asked.
NT have difficulties in that C# really means you can do anything and I understand they can't support everything but at times it can get very frustrating...
More so as a beginning script writer because until you 'get' C# ,support responses seem quite.. ahem - 'difficult'. ( Perhaps they don't realise that you don't know you're asking a dumb question because a bit like the Matrix you haven't yet got to the point to know how to ask the right question )
3. Forums - not anywhere near the scope of Tradestation but getting slowly better. Other sites like Big Mike Trading help as well.
4. NT7 is much better but it is still much less stable than say TS - it needs to be traded and left alone ( ie develop on your laptop, trade on your desktop)
Finally - is there something better out there - I don't know but currently I am quite happy. NT7 is a vast improvement on 6.5 but personally I think NT9 will be the daddy(lol).
I look at eveything out there and overall for the price I think NT just scrape in - they do need to improve their development cycle however ( 20 betas so far for NT7 seems a little excessive). There are other new boys on the block nipping at their tails.
I just don't understand Ninjatrader and I have started to look at other platforms. I just purchased a new omputer too to trade on and I have Ninjatrader onmy home computer. It crashes on both. It seems when I contact NT support all I am told is to continuously "Repair DB" or "Rename DB."
Recently I started looking for a new trading platform because of what happened in the attached pic.
I found this thread and I am hoping someone can explain howI put in a buy and it can go as a sell. This is an automated strategy so I know it was no mistake of mine and it worked ok yesterday. But ever so often, it would do crap like this.
Also, it want even allowing me to go live withmy strategy and I had to (once again) repair DB and remove onnection and reinstall connection. . . . ridiculous.
Another thing: I know everyone raves about NT backtesting, and maybe I am a newbie just at the backtesting thing, however, I can back test the same parameters 50 times and get 59 different results with Ninjatrader. I literally sat one day and kept backtesting the same thing over and over again and got different results every single time. How is this?
Check the Log tab. One way you can get this result is by using NT 6.5, and it running out of memory but not alerting you. The results are just garbage once this happens, it will let you keep running backtests, there is no popup dialog box to inform you of the out of memory condition. But, it will be logged.
You can certainly look for other platform, but if you don't understand the platform you will have the same results.
Do you think, after only starting, that all the NT users don't understand how to trade or how to execute a strategy and you come and discover a major bug? Its going short instead of long?
A hint: Maybe its exiting a previous trade?
I just know that for me this type of thing happens with regularity. As in exlax and metamucil creamy coctail goodness, goes out as smooth as it goes in, regularity. I'm just sayin.